Can The Jordan Insurance Agency help me with a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee Medicare plan?

Our Nashville office spends most of October explaining that Middle Tennessee is not one Medicare market. It is five or six of them stacked against each other, and people here cross three before lunch without noticing.

Can The Jordan Insurance Agency help me with a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee Medicare plan?

Yes. The Jordan Insurance Agency is an independent agency that works with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. From the Nashville office we review that company's Medicare products against the address you genuinely live at, explain the mechanics without the brochure language, and file the enrollment when you are satisfied. Several other Medicare organizations sit on the shelf beside it, so this is not a one-company conversation unless you want it to be.

I moved down from the Carolinas. Does my Blue Cross coverage come with me?

No. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee is a Tennessee company, separate from the Blue Cross plans in other states. The card you carried in Charlotte or Columbia was issued by a different organization, and it does not travel across the state line the way a driver's license does. This catches people constantly, because retirees moving south into Williamson and Sumner counties are a steady pattern here and the brand printed on the card looks identical from a distance. You are not renewing anything. You are choosing again, from a different company's filings, in a county you have only just started paying taxes in.

Nashville, Franklin and Murfreesboro feel like one city. Why do they give different Medicare answers?

Because Medicare takes no interest in how the traffic flows. Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson and Sumner are five separate counties and therefore five separate answers inside what everybody who lives here experiences as a single metro area. Somebody in Nolensville and somebody in Smyrna live twenty minutes apart and may be picking from different lists. We will not tell a client over the phone that a particular plan reaches them. We look it up against the address, and we look it up again the next year, because the county lines hold still while the filings behind them do not.

Do you offer every Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee Medicare plan?

No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Our appointments reach a set of Medicare organizations and a set of products within them, which is a real boundary and one you deserve to hear about at the beginning rather than discover in month seven. Medicare.gov and the 1-800-MEDICARE line exist precisely so that nobody has to take a single agency's word for what is out there, and we would encourage you to use them.

Does the Nashville office mean you only work with people in Davidson County?

No. The office is where we sit, not a boundary around who we help. We work across Middle Tennessee and well past it, and a good share of what we do happens by phone and video because that is what fits people's lives. What having the office does give you is somewhere to turn up in November with a grocery bag full of unopened mail and have a person go through it page by page. Some clients want that badly. Others never set foot in the building in five years. Both are perfectly normal.

Who pays the agent, and does it change my premium?

The carrier pays, and it does not change a thing. Medicare plan premiums are filed with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the figure is identical however the enrollment reaches them, whether that is directly, online, or through one of our licensed agents. There is no version of the plan with a service fee bolted onto the side. The suspicion that something must be hidden in there is reasonable and very common, and it is also wrong.

What about my prescriptions, and what happens when I travel?

Those two questions settle most Medicare decisions, and neither of them is really about which company is on the card. Drug coverage runs on its own rules and its own yearly rhythm, and what Medicare Part D is walks through them; the right answer there depends on your actual list with doses attached, not a general sense that you take a few things each morning. Travel is the other. If you spend part of the year somewhere else, or drive back to see grandchildren in the Carolinas every few weeks, how coverage behaves away from home matters enormously, and Medicare coverage when traveling goes through it. If you are still deciding what kind of coverage you want at all, what Medicare Advantage is is the sensible place to begin.

When can I switch, and when am I stuck?

Medicare Annual Enrollment runs October 15 to December 7, and whatever you choose then begins January 1. That is the main door and it is the one most people walk through. Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment runs January 1 to March 31 and applies only if you are already enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. A move, including the one that brought you to Tennessee in the first place, can open a Special Enrollment Period outside both of those, and Special Enrollment Periods explains which circumstances count and how much time they give you. Outside all of that, your Initial Enrollment when you first become eligible has rules of its own tied to your birthday and your working situation.

What happens after I enroll, and what should I watch for in the fall?

Each fall your plan mails a notice of what is changing for the coming year, and it may be the most ignored envelope in American retirement. The annual plan change notice explains how to read one without a law degree. Occasionally the news inside is bigger than a change, and a plan is not returning the following year at all. Carriers come into markets and go back out of them, and when that happens the notice reaches you with time to do something, provided the envelope gets opened. Bring it to the Nashville office in October and we will tell you honestly whether it matters. Quite often the answer after a full review is that your coverage still fits the life you are actually living, and the right thing to do is nothing.